PAX 2018: Hands-On Ride 3 Preview

Walking around the crowded EB Expo hall at PAX 2018, you’d be forgiven for missing certain games, and we completely missed Ride 3 on day 1. Luckily we walked past the booth on day 2 and that’s when Ride 3 caught our eye. Rocket Chainsaw and Ride are definitely not synonymous, though we do love a good racing game when we see it, and this time around it seems developers Milestone might be on to something. For our Ride 3 preview, we played on a base PlayStation 4 console.

While 2015’s Ride and 2017’s Ride 2 both had mixed reviews (to be perfectly honest we played the demos and weren’t impressed), it looks like the developers are 100% focused on continuing to produce what they believe will be a great franchise. With all new features, 300+ bikes and an extensive career, could Ride 3 be a sleeper racing game hit?

Watch the official Ride 3 Motorcycle Encyclopedia trailer:

The graphics in Ride 3 are the first thing that you will notice. Milestone have paid careful attention this time to how the game looks, and it’s looking like the first true powerful next-gen motorbike racing game is here. With different weather settings, day/night settings, rewind, photo mode, and a very fine-tuned difficulty slider, Ride 3 has everything a racing game fan could want and then some. While not every track has a night setting, the ones that do look amazing. The developers have mapped out a race track in Macau which can be played at night and it looks stunning. Combining it with reflections of puddles on the road and an amazing bike on a sharp corner make for some incredible photos, and we’re looking forward to seeing what players come up with when the game launches in just one month.

For our hands-on Ride 3 preview we decided to hit up an old classic track with an amazingly powerful 1000cc bike. Jumping on the 2018 Kawasaki 1000 SX we were quickly navigating the iconic corners of Laguna Seca in California. The difficulty had been turned up to 80% so we soon found ourselves battling among the sea of bikes until one managed to cause a crash. We forgot about the rewind feature which could have rectified it, but instead decided to test out the handling as well as the camera angles. One amazing feature of Ride 3 is that when you switch to helmet view the sound switches and realistically sounds like you’ve got your helmet on. You can stay in the same camera position but without the in-helmet sound if you want to, but we thought this was a great authentic feature that many people who haven’t ridden a bike before might not get to experience.

Laguna Seca looked very tidy, and although it didn’t have the dirt particles that some other games have, this was still a pre-beta build that we played. The bike handled as we expected, although we couldn’t seem to do any mono’s and there didn’t seem to be the option to lower your head like in the MotoGP games. Ride 3 promises 30 race tracks from all over the world, including GP circuits, city and country tracks, supermoto tracks, as well as drag strips. A detailed livery editor will allow you to customise your bike to make it look exactly how you want before you take it online.

Milestone is promising continued support for Ride 3 with weekly online challenges, and a season pass that will add 77 bikes to the 230+ at launch, and 195 events to the 350+ at launch. We are very interested to see how the public responds to Ride 3 as from our time with the game we’ve noticed that they have refined all corners (no pun intended) of it, and this iteration is looking great. With all the other big games coming out around this time of the year, Ride 3 could be your perfect casual-break game.

That’s it for our PAX 2018 hands-on Ride 3 preview. The game is launching on November 30 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows PC platforms. Stay tuned to Rocket Chainsaw for more on Ride 3 as we get closer to launch, and for more information head to the official website here.

David Latham

David has a Bachelor of Arts (Journalism) from a Group of Eight university, but only uses his very unique set of skills writing about video games. By day he's a stay-at-home dad, by night he's literally Batman. Where does he find the time?